Raymond Pettibon: Pictures, Literary Voices and Surfers, Too

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Raymond Pettibon in his Manhattan studio.CreditGeorge Etheredge for The New York Times

By Nancy Princenthal

Dec. 30, 2016

In his energetic drawings of baseball greats, Hollywood legends, comic book heroes and rock stars, of drug addicts, bikers and gangsters, Charles Manson and J. Edgar Hoover, Raymond Pettibon gives us the full sweep of the American social landscape.

Then he detonates it. Compounding his images — urgent, bold, often hallucinatory — are headlong inscriptions that mix original writing and material borrowed from authors spanning centuries. The medley can be clamorous. It is a vision of populism recast as anarchy.

“If there’s any voice, it’s multiple, even within the same work,” Mr. Pettibon said during my recent visit to his studio.

Rumpled and barefoot on a cold winter day, Mr. Pettibon, who turns 60 this year, seemed a little preoccupied. (As it turned out, he said he was “in the doghouse” with his wife, the artist Aïda Ruilova, and was sleeping here on a daybed.)

When I asked what percentage of the writing in his work is original, he said, hesitantly: “I wouldn’t hazard a guess. But it’s not one or the other. Nothing comes out of thin air. We all live with the same language and influences.” He added, “I’m just the conduit, the messenger.”

Perhaps no subject better captures the spirit of Mr. Pettibon’s drawings than that of surfers dwarfed by towering waves. “Someday you may find yourself at sea, alone,” reads one of several lines of text handwritten across the churning seas in a big watercolor, ink and acrylic work of 2015. Visitors will themselves confront a graphic tsunami in the survey of Mr. Pettibon’s work that opens in February at the New Museum. Organized by the curators Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, it will present roughly 700 drawings across three floors, as well as dozens of zines and hours of video. Mr. Gioni said it would make visitors “feel like you’ve been shouted at or spoken to in a multitude of voices for an hour or two.”

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“No Title (I mean alarmed)” (2013).CreditRaymond Pettibon, via David Zwirner, New York

Absorption in a state of distraction, the default mode in the digital era, is both method and message. It serves Mr. Pettibon well, deflecting attention from evidence, in his work and in person, of what seems an essentially inward, melancholy character.

Nonetheless there is a stated focus for the Pettibon survey, which is called “A Pen of All Work” (the title comes from Byron; the pen in question is Satan’s). It is meant to highlight the artist’s literary side. “We want to present him as someone who has an analytical understanding, complex, accurate and deliberate, of his sources,” Mr. Gioni explains. He believes that, taken together, the artist’s writings can be seen as a collaged Great American Novel. To that end, the show includes underlined passages Mr. Pettibon clips from volumes by St. Augustine and Robert Burton, John Ruskin, James Joyce and John Dos Passos. There are quotes from the Bible, and sports writing, and Mickey Spillane.

Barry Blinderman, who gave Mr. Pettibon his first solo exhibition, at the Semaphore Gallery in New York in 1986, said that from the start Mr. Pettibon used words in his drawings to hijack our minds’ drive to find meaning in images, in something like the way lyrics hijack music. But as the New Museum curators see it, the link to music supports a stubborn misperception. Mr. Pettibon’s initial drawings were for fliers and album covers promoting musicians in the Los Angeles punk scene, including his brother, Greg Ginn, a frontman for the band Black Flag (Raymond dropped the family name). As a result, Mr. Gioni contends, “there’s an assumption that Pettibon and his artwork represent an eternal American adolescence.”

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“No Title (You’re showing, I’m …)” (1998).CreditRaymond Pettibon, via David Zwirner, New York

Like many artists, Mr. Pettibon objects to interpretations based on his personal life. “It’s a hopeless cause to look at an artist and go into their biography,” he said with some annoyance. “It’s not like I have something to get off my chest and I want to get it down on paper.” He has long dismissed questions about his punk period with particular exasperation. Born in Tucson in 1957 and raised in Hermosa Beach, Calif., he studied economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating in 1977. His father taught English at junior colleges, wrote spy novels (mostly unpublished) and was an occasional painter; his mother was a housewife. Conforming to no stereotype — they were health-food enthusiasts and hippie-bashers — they were each, in their way, sympathetic to visual art.

Perched high on Mr. Pettibon’s studio wall, along with various small, kitschy canvases, were a handful of his father’s paintings of nudes. And among Mr. Pettibon’s own works in progress was a drawing based on the painting commonly known as “Whistler’s Mother.” When asked about the anomalous image — there are few mothers in Mr. Pettibon’s work — he reflected that his own was “my only fan for so many years.” He added: “She’s 95 now. She’s a great person. We always got along. The situation with the rest of the family is more complicated.”

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“Captive Chains” (1978).CreditRaymond Pettibon, via David Zwirner, New York

The subject quickly changed. But one undeniably self-referential character of his work is its gender. Guys — the things they like and the ways they behave — are its predominant subjects. The work’s simmering anger, dark humor and formal aggression, along with many of its references, are shared with such peers as Mike Kelley and, more distantly, Paul McCarthy, both visual bards of male angst. Studio visitors have been invited to hit a few baseballs (Mr. Pettibon had a pitching machine in a previous workplace) or to shoot some hoops (his current studio again has a basketball hoop; there is also an old surfboard on the wall). Even guessing the source of unattributed citations can become, for colleagues and critics, a competitive sport.

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Mr. Pettibon on his futon in his Manhattan studio.CreditGeorge Etheredge for The New York Times

If some of these inclinations suggest a West Coast flavor, it is dissipating. Mr. Pettibon moved to New York roughly seven years ago, a change he said was inconsequential. “With artists, their social networks aren’t what they used to be,” he said. And many references are more bound to time than place, including the animated characters Gumby and Vavoom, the latter a big-mouthed sidekick to Felix the Cat. The range of figures Mr. Pettibon looks to for visual inspiration is as catholic as his literary sources: Blake, Goya and Daumier; Reginald Marsh, John Sloan and Edward Hopper. He has no interest in graphic novels but is a fan of Peter Arno and Charles Addams; among the works in progress in his studio were three based on New Yorker cartoons.

Mr. Pettibon can be self-deprecating about his technical skills and is quick to point out that he is self-taught. “No one taught me how to draw, how to hold a pen, the mediums,” he said. “I did all that on my own.” But in a spontaneous studio demonstration of his idiosyncratic use of tobacconists’ pipe cleaners, from which he coaxes lines that uncannily mimic etched crosshatching, he displayed a quite magical deftness. He increasingly relies on watercolors and acrylic paint, having introduced color in the 1990s. Soon after, he began making large-scale drawings, many executed on gallery walls.

The New Museum will show for the first time drawings he made in childhood, updated with texts. His decision to return to them may reflect renewed interest in the creative efforts of children. (Mr. Pettibon has a 4-year-old son.) But his conviction that there are many ways to draw the boundaries around art, and to look at it, is longstanding. The feature-length videos in the show, including meditations on Patty Hearst, the Manson family and the Weather Underground, are variously gory, tedious, compelling and amateurish. They allow for viewing habits that include fast-forwarding and (more likely in a museum) walking away.

His interest in the variability of attention spans may explain Mr. Pettibon’s use of Twitter, which he approaches “as a way of working with form,” not content. To the novelist Dennis Cooper — one of several with whom he has collaborated — he said that he doesn’t read fiction for narrative, nor journalism for news. Instead, he likes to take language apart and expose its inner workings. His aversion to the topical is strong.

Yet, he admits, “there were a couple of shows that were political in nature.” They featured George W. Bush, and Mr. Pettibon said he found he could swap President Obama’s face for his predecessor’s “and nothing really changed.” But he’s not planning Donald J. Trump drawings and doesn’t mourn Hillary Clinton’s loss. (“I was not for Hillary at all; I was for Sanders or Stein or Johnson.”) While he called Mr. Trump’s rhetoric “really ugly — it brings the racism and xenophobia to the forefront and normalizes it, or attempts to” — he is heartened by the possible emergence of a strong opposition. And he insisted that “what matters to me is the reality of life on the ground” — of those caught up in the prison system, or in the armed forces. As his art demonstrates, he is drawn to the dispossessed. He listens hard to those attracted by what the press calls dog whistles. In one drawing, Vavoom — a Pettibon alter ego — quotes Henry James: “Remember that among the disinherited there’s a mystic language.” The quote continues, “They understand each other at half a word.”

Now that we have a president-elect who issues policy as tweets punctuated with exclamation marks — and for whom half a word is plenty — the language lessons that Mr. Pettibon offers are perhaps more valuable than ever.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR22 of the New York edition with the headline: Pictures, Literary Voices and Surfers, Too. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe